This time our word is going to be a little more renown and unique I think. Not many words in the German language have the letter “Q” in it. However, I always seem to remember the ones which do indeed have them. I came across this word very early on in my stay here in Germany but haven’t really cemented its meaning in my head yet until just now, I believe.

The word is “die Quelle”, and the first time I saw it was on a bottle of water. Of course then it was referring to where the water came from a place deep within the earth, also known as a spring. I made that connection and didn’t think anything more of it until the first day of classes in Goethe Berlin. At the bottom of some of the paper’s the teacher had wrote, “Quelle: Christine D.” Suddenly it clicked, eine Quelle is more of a source of something.

More specifically the first way I used it would be more proper to be said as “ein Quellewasser” and the second way is a more accurate usage of the word “eine Quelle” as the means of a source of something, in this case the exercise we needed to do for class.